


calvary

by Askance



Series: Mashiach [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, Inevitable Character Death, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stigmata
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 02:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A very small voice in Dean’s brain says, quite plainly, <i>Sam is dying</i>. Smaller, and numbly, he replies, <i>I know</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	calvary

_7 PM_

He stretches out his arms to either side of his body, involuntarily: straightens his bones. The shaking of him turns his palms upward to the white stippled ceiling. Two points of wine-dark blood, like eyes. Staring, like his own eyes, open and fluttering too.

Dean comes back into the room, fingernails red and slick. His oxygen seizes in his chest, hard horned fingers of air clamping down on his ribs, locking up his knees, but he manages to make it to the bed before he comes down in something like genuflection. Smelling the soap on his hands beneath the wretched stink of flowers. Somewhere in his periphery, Castiel stands. Watches.

A very small voice in Dean’s brain says, quite plainly, _Sam is dying._ Smaller, and numbly, he replies, _I know._

* * *

_8 PM_

Sam’s shaking quiets when the sun goes down and the cool suggestion of nighttime pushes against the window-panes, black, smooth, curving. (Cars move past the pallid room, arrive and are gone, their noise a hush like the sea.) He lies atop the covers, almost naked, and his skin cold, _radiating_ cold in a way that Dean can _feel_ , not just in the palms of his hands where he grips his brother’s wrist but in his lungs, too, a winter-breath in his throat. Or the chill of a cave-tomb carved into stone.

Gooseflesh rises and falls on Sam’s forearms and he breathes, heavily, as if a great pressure sits on his chest, seeps into the hollows of his bones, squeezes at his heart. He doesn’t seem to see anything but stares with glimmering eyes at a point above his head, lips open, tongue trembling as if he wants to speak. Dean wants to say, _don’t speak._ He’s afraid that the only word that will make it past Sam’s teeth will be _goodbye_.

At least he’s still.

Cas sits down on the opposite side of the bed. He presses a washcloth from the bathroom to the wound in Sam’s side and holds it there, bows his head, reverent.

Dean grips his wrist harder, feels the veins in Sam’s arm shift under his fingers. He must be so brittle. Ulna and radius could snap like dry twigs. Beneath his paper-thin flesh, the white of a moth’s wing, Sam’s veins are the blue of Montana sky. Salt water.

How can it be that he is still bleeding?

* * *

 

_9 PM_

He seems to fall asleep, but his eyes move beneath their lids in a way too frantic even for dreaming.

Dean’s face feels tight and hot, a mask of dried tears. He could almost imagine that to smile or blink too hard would make him crack and fall apart like so much dust on his brother’s straining chest.

“What’s he seeing?” Dean asks, in more of a croak than a voice. Sam’s fingers are twitching, as if plucking gently at an unseen string, and his bandages are soaked through. Badges of red.

Castiel’s hand is soaked red, too, and when he pulls the cloth away from Sam’s side Dean glimpses it—a neat opening in the flesh, shaped like an open mouth. Blood stains the bed, rests in smears against his skin.

“I don’t know,” Cas says, reaching up gently to push a stray hair out of Sam’s face. Sam seems to feel his touch, turns his head infinitesimally towards it. Every breath he takes shudders in his chest; it’s becoming a rhythm. Smooth draw, swallow, shake, shiver, exhale, as if a thousand little birds are beating around inside him.

Dean sniffs, scrubs a hand over his eyes. He cradles Sam’s cheek in his hand, thumb flush against the sharp outline of his bones, and Sam turns into that touch fully, seems to sigh. His eyelids open for just a moment, a sliver of eye-white, and close again. _What are you seeing, Sammy?_ Dean thinks, and then, _don’t speak, don’t speak._ Sam’s breath floats across his wrist. He has never been so scared in his life.

* * *

 

_10 PM_

Dean lifts Sam’s hand, gently, and slips a finger beneath his bandages. They’re dripping with blood now. When he pulls it off, over the knuckles, the wound pulses and blood runs in rivers down Sam’s arm—dark and glimmering, pooling in the crook of his elbow. Cas looks up.

“It’s going to stain,” he says. As if that _matters_.

“What’s the point?” Dean says. He feels blank inside, scraped open and clean. He reaches across Sam’s body for his other hand and pulls that bandage off, too. “They’re no use anyway.”

He wants to see Sam’s blood. He wants it to stain everything, the coverlet and sheets and mattress. The floor. His fingers. His hands, his arms. He wants it to coat his skin so deeply that it dyes him the colour of his little brother’s death so that he can look in the mirror and remember it with a raw and ugly clarity. _Remember. Remember how he was too holy for you to hold._ He wants people to see him in the street and see all of these last months painted into his flesh, tattooed in, written into his marrow. He wonders what the Hebrew word for _finished_ is.

Like poppies blooming from Sam’s fingers the bed grows wet.

* * *

 

_11 PM_

Sam opens his eyes and looks at Dean—no. _Through_ him. Past the surfaces of his eyes into the point at the back of his skull. There’s something lucid about him, though, and Dean feels his heart both leap and sink when Sam whispers his name.

“I’m here,” Dean says. He touches Sam’s cheek with the back of his hand, knuckles skimming over the gaunt hollows of his face, thumbing a wayward tear-track away from the bridge of his nose. “Hey, kiddo.”

“See,” Sam whispers, and takes a deep, painful, shattering breath. It sounds like a rattle in his throat. “See.” His hand lifts a few centimeters off the bed as if to point to the ceiling but never makes it that far and then comes softly down again, into the damp red circle on the sheets.

Castiel gets up, to wring the washcloth out in the bathroom, and Dean sees him standing at the sink with it—dripping blood into the white porcelain—his hands shaking. He puts it down and comes back without it. Presses his own naked hand to the wound in Sam’s side. Dean half expects it to light up with that healing glow, but it doesn’t. Nothing would heal even if it did.

“Dean,” Sam says again, and coughs, wet and hacking. Then his head lolls back and he sighs and closes his eyes again.

“Yeah, Sammy,” Dean whispers, all the syllables muddy and thick on his tongue. He’s so far away. “Yeah, kiddo, I’m here.”

* * *

 

_12 AM_

Dean lifts Sam’s head up, cradles it against the inside of his wrist, to gently work the bandage off his brow. The blood mats his long dark hair in blackish scabs and he tenderly runs his fingers through it, breaking it up, smoothing it out. His hands are wet, now, too, and smudged. He thinks it might dry beneath his fingers for the rest of his life, like stone, like paint. He wants that. Angrily, he wants that.

* * *

 

_1 AM_

No one thinks to light a lamp. Sam’s lips move, but no sound comes out. Dean lifts Sam’s hand to his face and rests against it, his eyes two points of glow from the streetlight outside, looking down at his brother’s open mouth.

Castiel goes in to wash his hands.

* * *

 

_2 AM_

“You should sleep.”

“No.”

“He’ll last the night. Dean.”

“No.”

“Just for a little while.”

“No.”

A slash of sodium-yellow street-light cuts across Dean’s body, Sam’s face. Castiel sees Sam’s open eyes, roving the ceiling, the upward curve of his mouth.

Dean bows his head back into shadow.

* * *

 

_3 AM_

Sam speaks again, and begins to shake again, limbs rigid and jittery. Incoherent words and gasps intermingled in ways that neither Dean nor Castiel can make sense of. Only the occasional familiar sound— _Dean;_ _oh; see—_

At one point he reaches hysteria, seems more awake than he has been all night, and he cries, hot thin tears against Dean’s hand. “Look, look,” he says, frantic— _joyful._ “Dean—see, Dean, look, please—oh—”

But there is nothing to see; nothing on the white stippled ceiling. Something golden seems reflected in Sam’s eyes and he breathes in, “ _oh._ Oh—” And Dean is scared, so scared.

* * *

 

_4 AM_

Hysterical joy becomes hysterical pain, and Sam heaves and gasps as if something is twisting in his chest. All Dean can do is hold his shoulders down against the bed, feel Sam’s useless hand clutching at his thigh, at his shirt, watch his eyes roll back in his head. It takes almost an hour for the pain to subside, and Sam _laughs,_ a weary desperate noise, a horrible thing.

Dean lets go of his body long enough to stumble into the bathroom and retch, his head full of the stink of Sam’s garden veins and the sound of his laughter. Laughing at his own pain, laughing at his own death, laughing at whatever glory he sees on the ceiling, laughing the way he used to laugh when he was bright and healthy and alive, the way he used to laugh at jokes, at mishaps, at cheesy sitcoms at two in the morning, laughing with an open mouth and bright teeth while he lies bleeding and shaking and hallucinating, _how is that fair?_ How is it fair that he has enough joy left in him to laugh like that, the way he once laughed only for Dean? For true and solid and human things?

Why is he laughing? And how, how is he still bleeding?

Dean wipes his mouth off on the back of his sleeve and smears Sam’s blood against his face. He curls against the bathtub and cries, hot ugly tears, cries and retches again. _He’ll last the night._ But how much longer after that? How much longer does he have? Will it be any less terrible when the day has broken?

* * *

 

_5 AM_

Thank God. ( _Fuck God._ ) Sam stops laughing.

* * *

 

_6 AM_

Castiel pulls his hand away from Sam’s side and says, “Dean.”

The mask of dried tears has formed again on Dean’s face and his eyes feel like glass, but he looks up. Cas raises his palm, tilts his fingers. Bloody still, but what drips from his fingertips isn’t blood. It’s water.

Something in Castiel’s face seems to say _it won’t be long now_.

Dean puts his head down on the pillow next to Sam’s, feels his little brother’s breath against his cheek. He wants to memorise it, the length of each inhale and exhale, the cold scent of it, wants to understand distinctly the chemistry and the biology of the oxygen and the carbon dioxide and the fluttering of his lungs and keep all that secret knowledge to himself. _How did he breathe?_ He knows. He knew Sam’s breathing when it was just baby breath, when it smelled like milk and Cheerios, and he knew it when it was little-boy breath and he taught him how to hold his toothbrush in his hand, and he knew it when it was hot and angry and trailing after words like _I’m leaving, Dean_ and _I have to go,_ and he knew it when it was all his, all in his own mouth, and it was his breath too, and their hearts had the same beat for a minute and a half, and he knows it now while it’s being sucked away back into Sam’s throat and it’s frigid. It could almost turn to ice. His body is so terribly cold.

Maybe he should draw a blanket over him—but that seems too much like a shroud.

* * *

 

_7 AM_

Dean becomes aware that he is humming before he even feels the desire to begin. It isn’t a real melody. His throat is too full of sadness for that.

Sam turns his face to the sound but his eyes are closed. Dean is acutely and suddenly afraid that he’s never going to open them again.

_This little light of mine,_ he hums, wordless. It seems like the right kind of thing. The tune is the last thing he has.

* * *

 

_8 AM_

Sam watches something play out above his head and smiles at it, serene. He seems almost awake. Blood from his brow drips into his eyes, mats his eyelashes together, but he blinks it away, slowly, content. “See,” he whispers, as if imparting some great secret. “See.”

His eyelids flutter closed and something seems to fill his chest. “Oh.”

* * *

 

_9 AM_

The pain, again. It contorts his face but not his body. He can’t seem to move anymore.

Dean strokes his hair, his face. He climbs up onto the bed, tired of trying to avoid the blood. Pulls Sam up into his arms and settles his head on his shoulder and presses his lips against the crown of Sam’s head and hopes to God he doesn’t laugh again unless it’s to laugh at Death receding.

The wound in his side still pours water, and Castiel keeps his hand pressed against it. It washes the blood from his fingers. Absolution.

* * *

 

_10 AM_

Dean hums until he loses the song entirely and he closes his eyes and pretends—imagines with everything he has—that Sam is gangly, small, fourteen, flu-stricken. Sleeping in his arms because he has always slept there best. And in a few days his fever will break, and the cough will last for a while, but he’ll have health in his face, he’ll run down sidewalks, he’ll pull faces and grin. He’ll race Dean down the road while the sun is setting and beat him by a half a minute and then he’ll jump up and down on the asphalt with his little fists raised in triumph and he’ll wheel under the sky for a moment as if the whole world would fit into the span of his arms and he’ll laugh, and he won’t bleed unless he scrapes his knees when he falls, he won’t pray for dying, he won’t have wine and water in his veins. He won’t.

He’s just sleeping off a sickness.

Opening his eyes is a mistake. Sam isn’t gangly and small and fourteen. He won’t ever beat Dean in a foot-race ever again and that—that is what hurts the most, of all of this, that his baby brother won’t ever take off down a street with the wind in his hair and a cocksure grin on his beautiful face ever, ever again, he won’t smell the milkweed and the dandelion, he won’t be bitten by mosquitos and chiggers in the grass, he won’t dash towards a painted horizon as if he could leap right through it, he won’t feel the sting of asphalt under his shoes, he won’t crow a pointless noise of simple happiness or lift his hands up to the clouds or turn a mocking smile on his brother back down the way, he won’t ever, ever, ever, never any of that again.

Dean can’t number, anymore, the pieces into which his heart has broken.

* * *

 

_11 AM_

Sam cries. Joy or pain, neither Dean nor Castiel can tell anymore. But his tears are red and slow and creep down his face in searching rivulets.

How can he still be bleeding?

* * *

 

_12 PM_

And he won’t ever slam a car door after him. Won’t ever flag down an ice cream van the dusk after a hunt, to Dean’s protest, to buy them popsicles, to celebrate. Won’t ever fall asleep with a book still propped up on his stomach, open to page fifty-nine, mouth slack against the pillow. Won’t ever complain that his faux-fed suits never fit quite right. Never again. Won’t ever catch Dean’s wrist in hands that are whole and push a drunken kiss against his cheek. Won’t ever use up all the hot water. Won’t ever put his shirt on backwards by mistake. Won’t ever stand up tall and sweet-faced and gentle, ever again. Won’t ever walk across a parking lot, just a shadow in the nighttime, with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders back, his chin tipped up, gazing at the simple beauty of the salt-sprinkled stars, taking moments of peace from chaos and pulling them around himself like a warm winter coat against the cold and the dark and the sadness of it all.

* * *

 

_1 PM_

“Oh,” he whispers, more breath than voice, more blood than body, “oh,” and then another syllable—it sounds like _me—oh, me,_ or _oh, Dean,_ or _hold me—_ until it forms itself into _holy—holy, holy, holy, holy._

Quietly, Castiel lifts Sam’s limp and paper-white hand and rests it on his concave stomach, against the shallowness of his breath. As if to lay him out like a corpse when he is bloodless. But Dean still holds his other hand, and will not let it go.

* * *

 

_2 PM_

_And he won’t ever be with me again._

* * *

 

_3 PM_

He is very, very still.

Blood is drying on Dean’s hands, his face, his clothes. On Castiel’s, too. And the only sound there is is the softness of Sam’s breathing.

He sighs, and turns his head, imperceptibly, and his eyes open. All the colours of the earth in them. Dandelion gold, and black like blacktop, and green like the weeds on the side of the road, and the ochre of good clay, and faint and starry moss. In them Dean thinks he can see something rising upward, unfettered.

Like a kite and all its tails whispering in the sky.

Sam smiles. The barest upturning of his lips. The gentle slip of one more tear descends from the corner of his eye—a human tear—salt water, Montana blue.

He could be the whole world. All the blood and green creation. All the little lights.

All the breath.

The only sound.

Triumphant laughter in the road.

It goes.

**Author's Note:**

> This series belongs in part to Casey, whose contributions can be read [here.](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com/fanfiction)
> 
> Calvary is the name of the hill upon which Christ was crucified.


End file.
